Listening to Prestige Records Part 96: Quincy Jones

The Lionel Hampton gang still in Sweden, still breaking away from Hamp to play some bebop with the Swedes, still giving Gigi Gryce and Quincy Jones to work out the arrangements they want to hear. This time it's Jones, and these are archetypal Quincy Jones arrangements -- full, melodic, adventurous, great ensemble voicings, plenty of room for improvisation.These Swedish sessions are the first recordings of Jones as an arranger, and they really show him already at a peak of form.

Jones doesn't play any trumpet on this set -- I guess if you've got Art Farmer handling that aspect, you don't really need to. Farmer has plenty of room to stretch out here, and he sounds great.

Jones doesn't play any piano, either, but it turns out that's covered very nicely too. Bengt Hallberg never ventured far beyond his native Sweden, but he made a name for himself that stretched far beyond the Scandinavian borders. Miles Davis, in a 1955 Leonard Feather blindfold test for Billboard, was

played one of these tunes, and said,

The piano player gasses me – I don’t know his name. I’ve been trying to find out his name. He’s from Sweden. . . . I think he made those records with Stan, like “Dear Old Stockholm.” I never heard anybody play in a high register like that. So clean, and he swings and plays his own things…

Hallberg died in 2013, at age 80.

Listening to Prestige Records - Part 13: Swedes

A lot of American expats ended up in Sweden in the late 40s and early 50s, and a lot of Swedes were playing jazz too. Arne Domnerus (also sax and clarinet) recorded with a quintet in Stockholm in August, September and October of 1949, for the Sedish jazz label Metronome, and the sides were released in the US, in the Prestige 100 series of 10 inch LPs, PRLP 134, as New Sounds From Sweden, Volume 4. Bob Weinstock must have made quite a deal with Metronome Records, because there were also volumes 1 - 3: PRLP 119, 121 and 133, mostly led by Domnerus or Lars Gullin. Another Swedish jazzman, Reinhold Svensson, had PRLP 106 and 129. The Domnerus sessions were recorded earliest, though not released earliest. I listened to "Body and Soul" from the first session, and it's not bad at all. He seems to have been a versatile little devil. His catalog, which is extensive on Spotify, includes standards, Dixieland tunes, modern compositions, and a lot of songs with Swedish names, in which you can pick out word like "tango" and "Polska."

Lars Gullin could and did hold his own with some of the best American jazz musicians, and was the 1954 winner of DownBeat's Most Promising Newcomer award for 1954.

Other Swedes who had records released by Prestige: Bengt Hallberg, Ulf Linde, Rolf Blomquist, and Leonard Feather's Swingin' Swedes. I mention all this now because as daunting a task as this is, I may decide to stick to American musicians.